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Activities: Context Activities Beyond the Pale: Interracial Relationships and "The Tragic Mulatta"  Back to Context Activities
In nineteenth-century America, interracial romantic and sexual relationships were considered taboo within white culture. Viewed by many as leading to the "degeneration" of the white race, "racial mixing" was a locus of anxiety and alarm. Pseudoscientific theories backed up racist notions that conceived of black, white, and Native American people as essentially physically and psychologically different from one another, contending that those differences were traceable to people's blood. Antebellum Americans originally used the term "amalgamation" to describe interracial sex, but later coined the word miscegenation, with Latin roots, because it sounded more "scientific." Many states had laws on the books forbidding interracial sex, and social stigmas everywhere categorized interracial relationships as unacceptable. When Frederick Douglass (himself the child of a white man and a black woman) married his white assistant, Helen Pitts, after the death of his first wife, even some of his socially progressive black and white associates in the North were outraged. When Lincoln's political adversaries wanted to undermine his public approval, they accused him of endorsing miscegenation (which, in fact, he did not support). Despite attempts to legislate against it, miscegenation has existed in America since the first settlements of European immigrants in the sixteenth century. Sexual relationships among Native Americans, blacks, and whites were far from anomalous. By the nineteenth century, sex between black slaves and their white masters and mistresses had become common enough that it was a source of intense anxiety in American culture. Some whites worried that black women were seducing white men, or that black men would rape white women. In reality, most interracial sex occurred because the powerless social position of enslaved black women left them vulnerable to rape by white men. In certain parts of the South, this kind of sexual exploitation was institutionalized; slave auctions of "fancy girls"--the term used to describe especially attractive young slave women--allowed white men to purchase concubines. The mixed-race children resulting from these sexual relationships, called "mulattos," legally followed the condition of their mothers and were thus considered slaves. While white masters occasionally freed or gave special treatment to the children they fathered by slave women, most simply worked and sold their own children like other slaves. The plight of these mixed-race people was of particular interest to white abolitionists. They found a special poignancy in a person who was virtually white--a person with only one black great-grandparent could be held as a slave in the South--and was still treated as a slave and subject to all the cruelties of slavery. The figure of the practically white slave woman, or tragic mulatta, became a stock character in northern antebellum stories, novels, and plays, beginning with Lydia Maria Child's short story "The Quadroons" (1842). Beautiful, virtuous, and endowed with all the graces of white-middle-class "true womanhood," the tragic mulatta is usually portrayed as becoming involved with a white man whom she cannot marry because of her "single drop" of "black blood." Other popular sentimental plots explore the stories of mixed-race women who marry non-white men and then experience all the hardships and persecutions inflicted on their husband's race (Eliza Harris in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ramona fit this paradigm). In any case, the fate of the mixed-race heroine in sentimental fiction usually involves tragedy. Although these stories stirred up abolitionist sentiment among white readers, they also had the effect of reinforcing racist assumptions. As many critics have pointed out, white readers may have found the tragic mulatta character sympathetic because she was so similar to themselves. In portraying only these mixed-race women as tragic, abolitionist authors implied that an enslaved white person was somehow more deserving of sympathy than an enslaved black person was. At the same time, the figure of the tragic mulatta also had radical, progressive potential: in mediating between racial categories, she exposed the arbitrary nature of racial distinctions. It is perhaps the radical, unsettling potential of the "tragic mulatta" figure that has given her currency in the work of later American novelists such as Nella Larsen (Unit 11) and Toni Morrison (Unit 16). Questions
[1653] J. H. Kent, Helen Pitts Douglass (n.d.), courtesy of the National Parks Service, Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. Helen Pitts, a white woman from Rochester, New York, where Frederick Douglass long resided, became Douglass's second wife in 1884, braving the resultant controversy. After Douglass's death in 1895, she worked to preserve his historical legacy. [1851] Anonymous, The Slave Sale (c. 1855), courtesy of Smithsonian Institute, National Museum of American History. The caption of this lithograph reads "The Hammer Falls . . . he has got her body and soul unless God help her." Artists and writers used images of "white" slaves, especially young women threatened by sexual abuse, to show the evils of slavery. [6828] Anonymous, The Death of Clotel, in William Wells Brown, Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). One of the first published novels by an African American, Clotel told the story of a slave daughter of Thomas Jefferson and contained Brown's own personal slave narrative, as well as a fictionalized version of William and Ellen Craft's story. [6852] Anonymous, Ellen Craft the Fugitive Slave [frontspiece] (1860), courtesy of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860) by William Craft published by William Tweedie, London. The light-skinned Ellen Craft escaped from slavery with her husband, William, by posing as a white man and her husband's master, symbolizing how slavery and resistance disrupted the "normal" social order. [6877] Anonymous, Ellen Craft (1879), courtesy of the Library of Congress, Rare Books and Special Collections Division. In this portrait published in William Still's The Underground Railroad, Craft is shown in conservative female dress and with her light skin. |
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